Welcome to Smuggle Me

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising around about LifeLock. I’m not sure how many of you have seen it, but in this rampant world of identify theft, I think we all stop and take a quick look at anything that we can do to protect our identity. As a tech person, people are always asking me if it’s safe to make purchases online. My answer is always yes. You do have to be careful, but life isn’t worth living if you are living it in a state of fear.

I’m pretty sure that many of those people still don’t shop online because their worried. I think it’s these people that are the perfect target market for LifeLock. The most catchy thing about their offer is their $1 Million Service Guarantee. However, the most startling thing I find on LifeLock is that the CEO put his social security number on their website.
Certainly you could make the argument that it’s good marketing, but it does also show that he’s not afraid to “eat his own dog food.”

I think that LifeLock has an interesting service. I personally hate things that have reoccurring fees and so that would be the biggest downer for me. It seems like much of their process can easily be automated and processing power is cheap. Why not offer a product that is a one time fee to protect me against certain vulnerabilities? I expect high net worth individuals won’t even blink an eye at the cost since it really is low at $10 a month.

As a small comparison, in my past life I worked at Discover card taking calls on one of their products that was called “The Register.” (at least if my memory serves me correct). There service protects ALL your credit cards in case they were lost or stolen or fraudulently used. The basic service was $9 a year and the premium service was something like $27 a year. The premium service did like LifeLock and would call and cancel any of your cards for you if you lost your wallet. This was a really nice service for people who had piles of credit cards, which is A LOT of people. I couldn’t believe how many credit cards they had.

At the end of the day, the credit card companies already cover your credit cards for anything over $50 and debit cards over $500. However, the process of telling the credit card companies about identity theft is what you want to avoid. If LifeLock can help with that, then it will be well worth the $10 a month. Not to mention, they take you off the credit card mailing lists which might be worth $10 a month also.

The reality is that identity theft is a real problem and if you don’t choose to go with something like LifeLock, you really need to consider doing something to protect your identity.